Thrive Capital led VCs into pro sports ownership; Collaborative Fund just upped that play

Collaborative Fund, the 15-year-old, New York-based generalist venture firm that has roughly $1 billion under management and which made early bets on Lyft, Reddit, Sweetgreen, and Olipop, among others, is taking a stake in the soccer club D. United and its stadium, Audi Field. It’s the latest — and smallest — firm to try something that Thrive Capital opened the door to just months ago: turning venture money into pro sports ownership. To recap, Joshua Kushner’s Thrive launched a new vehicle, Thrive Eternal, explicitly built to hold “iconic franchises and cultural institutions” for decades, funded ’s venture and growth funds. The firm kicked things off by announcing a stake in the San Francisco Giants. Months later, the same vehicle — with former Disney CEO Bob Iger, a Thrive partner, joining as co-owner — bought the Lakers outright for a record $12.5 billion. Historically, money has poured into pro sports two other ways: individual tech fortunes, and private equity. For example, Vinod Khosla and his family agreed this summer to buy the Seattle Seahawks for a record $9.6 billion soon after the Khosla family also took a stake in the San Francisco 49ers alongside OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor. That was a personal-wealth play, the kind we’ve seen over and over. At the same time, the two firms’ approaches to sports ownership look very different. Thrive built a standalone, permanent-capital vehicle specifically to hold trophy assets. Collaborative is investing out of the same early-stage fund it uses to write seed and Series A checks, and treating the deal less like something to buy and hold and almost more like infrastructure. In a memo shared with TechCrunch, Collaborative Fund founder and managing partner Craig Shapiro framed the deal as an extension of what the firm already does. “A franchise is the ultimate consumer product,” he wrote, arguing that D. United’s status as one of Major League Soccer’s original clubs gives Collaborative access to an institution with a decades-long fan base to build on. He pointed to the tailwinds around American soccer specifically (a World Cup just behind the sport, the LA Olympics ahead of it, soaring youth participation numbers in the U. C.’s ownership of Audi Field in Washington, D. C., plus a talent-development pipeline through Loudoun County, Virginia, and rights to a future Baltimore expansion team. Indeed, the thesis Shapiro laid out at a TechCrunch StrictlyVC event Thursday night in New York is less about owning a piece of an appreciating asset – the sports team itself – and more about what the team makes possible.